Best Exploitation Flicks: Machete's Over-the-Top Ancestors

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Best Exploitation Flicks: Machete's Over-the-Top Ancestors

Machete strikes a bloody blow for B-movie revivalists Friday, when Robert Rodriguez unveils his timely gore fest about an ex-Federale caught up in a nasty anti-immigrant conspiracy.
The picture, which stars ex-convict actor Danny Trejo in the title role alongside genre queens Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez, expands on a fake trailer initially featured on Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's 2007 Grindhouse double bill.
It's the latest homage to exploitation films and B movies, the low-budget cinematic spectacles fueled by sex, violence and vulgarity that attract cult audiences and have proven surprisingly influential over the years.
To explore the most outrageously fun movies ever made, we went straight to the experts who pick films for genre blowouts like Fantastic Fest and the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival. We also tossed in some picks from grindhouse connoisseur Tarantino and threw in a few favorites of our own. Brace yourself for this look at 27 of the weirdest, boldest and bloodiest exploitation films ever made.
Above:

The Hidden

"Alien invaders are such major turds!" opines Zack Carlson, an authority on B-movie posters and programmer of Fantastic Fest, the annual genre-film extravaganza in Austin, Texas. "They come to our planet completely uninvited, take over our bodies, listen to blistering heavy metal, commit explosive, murderous crimes and then exit our bullet-ridden corpses to possess a new host. So rude!"
The villain in this 1987 action meltdown: an interplanetary body-hopping convict with a penchant for machine guns, rocket launchers and flamethrowers. "No one is spared," says Carlson. "Old men, police sergeants and strippers are all direct targets for this pan-galactic parasitic jerkwad."
Bonus points: Machete's Danny Trejo played a doomed convict in The Hidden while Twin Peaks' Kyle MacLachlan co-starred as a mysterious, laser-bearing stranger.

The Car

"Christine is a total puss," says Carlson, who thinks Stephen King and John Carpenter's bloodthirsty automobile has nothing on the vicious vehicular star of 1977's The Car.
"James Brolin plays a desert-community sheriff faced with an all-powerful, four-wheeled custom cruiser self-driven by the devil and capable of breathtaking paranormal feats of human extermination," Carlson told Wired.com in an e-mail. "Cops, children, wife-beaters, schoolteachers and cross-country bicyclists all find themselves smeared across the pavement under Lucifer's hungry wheels."
The car was modeled after the real-life luxury vehicle of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, who served as the movie's on-set creative consultant.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Inspired by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, Tobe Hooper made 1974 proto-slasher flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for $140,000, struggled to find a distributor because of the movie's uncompromising gore, popularized the use of power tools as murder weapons and got vindication when the film grossed $31 million in mid-'70s dollars.

Death Wish 3

Carlson marvels at how Charles Bronson cranked up the hyperactive violence in 1985's X-rated Death Wish sequel, which is crammed with nearly 50 on-screen homicides on the streets of New York. "Though it was their fifth feature together," Carlson says, "Bronson’s disdain for the project led to him never working with director Michael Winner again."

Race With the Devil

Like the poster for this 1975 occult thriller says, "When you race with the devil ... you'd better be faster than hell."
Carlson elaborates on Race With the Devil's weird charms: "A brimstone-blazing array of Texan black-arts cultists perform bone-shattering automotive stunts, wicked sacrifices and kamikaze attacks. On the receiving end of Satan's pokey stick are Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as two urban goofballs who’ve taken their wives out into the badlands for an RV getaway. Turns out 'RV' stands for 'ritual violence,' and these big-city lunks are in for a bare-fisted firestorm of Luciferial wrath.”

The Pom Pom Girls

Quentin Tarantino singles out this 1976 drive-in flick from Joseph Ruben as a guilty pleasure, ranking it No. 20 on his list of Top 20 Grindhouse Movies for The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database.
In the vein of Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977) and Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend (1979), The Pom Pom Girls featured reckless car races and high-school sexcapades.

Raw Force

Carlson itemizes the essentials of this 1982 Filipino/American co-production: "Blue-skinned undead samurai? Check! Cannibalistic rump-chasing monks? Yes sir! Drunken kung-fu yacht party? To the max! Wall-eyed, flesh-trading seaplane pilot with a Hitler mustache? All this is just the tip of the trashberg!”

Get Mean

"The spaghetti Western cycle started getting weirder when producers juiced it up with outside elements," says Lars Nilsen, who oversees the Alamo Drafthouse's Weird Wednesday B-movie series in Austin, Texas.
Nilsen cites kung-fu Westerns, sex Westerns and bad-comedy Westerns as prime offenders, and recaps 1976's Get Mean thusly: "An American gunslinger fights Vikings and Moors while trying to transport a Spanish princess back to her rightful throne. The anachronisms are never explained or even alluded to as this cigarillo-chomping Man With No Name wanders around medieval Europe fighting fur-clad barbarians with broadswords."

Fight for Your Life

In 1977's Fight for Your Life, three escaped convicts — a Latino, an Asian and a white supremacist — invade the middle-class home of a black doctor and his family. Evil ensues. "And then the tables turn," Nilsen explains. "The third act of the film is one of the most satisfying and morally ambivalent displays of pure payback ever devised. It's primal."

Lady Terminator

In this Indonesian horror film, "A vapid anthropology student (Barbara Ann Constable) is infected with the centuries-old Curse of the South Sea Queen by a magic sea snake that takes up residence in her vagina," explains Nilsen.
There's more. Once she emerges from the sea, the so-called Lady Terminator wreaks havoc in Jakarta by annihilating the genitals of every man she meets.

Werewolves on Wheels

“Not only does this movie have werewolves and bikers, it also has satanic monks, a snake dance, tons of improvised dialogue and, best of all, some ridiculous, irresponsible stunts,” says Nilsen. "A burning stuntman runs around for three or four minutes being consumed by 10-foot flames. Now that’s commitment!"

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

Trash-film aficionado Jeff Ross, who produces the annual San Francisco horror-and-fantasy blast known as the Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, describes 1977's Death Bed: The Bed That Eats as "the king of esoteric '70s trash-cinema surrealism."
"This bizarre trip chronicles what happens when a demon cries on your satin sheets, a bed that eats through some kind of interdimensional waterbed reality," he says.

Wicked, Wicked

Maybe it was just a gimmick to compete with 3-D back in 1973. Still, you’ve got to give the Wicked, Wicked filmmakers credit for trying. Ross explains: "This is only movie filmed in the process called Duo-Vision. Almost the entire film is in split-screen so you get two movies at once for the price of one.“

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster

"There's more found footage and bikinis in this unintentional Godardian masterpiece than all '60s sci-fi movies combined," says Ross of this 1965 genre mashup.

Impulse

1974's Impulse is a must-see for William Shatner fans, according to Ross. "The sheer pathos Shatner puts into this role will astound any audience and drive them to drink," he says. Made after Shatner's Star Trek glory days, Shathner plays a gigolo in director William Grefe's movie.

Night of the Living Dead

George Romero’s 1968 zombie movie, shot for $114,000 in the Pennsylvania countryside, transformed amateur thespians’ stiff acting into a virtue and ratcheted the gore factor to then-unprecedented heights. One secret to Night of the Living Dead's success? Animal organs provided by the local butcher.

Rolling Thunder

“Screenwriter Paul Schrader must have been going through some pretty dark shit in the '70s," Nilsen speculates. "First Taxi Driver then this: Vietnam POW Maj. Charles Rayne, played by William Devane, comes home to San Antonio to find his marriage on the rocks and a son who doesn’t remember him. When a gang of scumbags take away everything he has left — including his hand — he and his Army buddy (Tommy Lee Jones) hit the road with enough rage and firepower to destroy a small nation. If you want an orgy of revenge and violence, this is your movie, but you're going to feel it in your soul afterwards."
Quentin Tarantino liked 1977's Rolling Thunder so much he named his production company after it.

Master of the Flying Guillotine

This 1975 martial arts fight fest starred actor-director Jimmy Wang Yu as One-Armed Boxer and served as an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino.

The Savage Seven

This Quentin Tarantino favorite from 1968 follows insane bikers as they wreak havoc on an Indian reservation.

Two Thousand Maniacs!

Decades before Eli Roth made torture-porn fashionable, this low-budget 1964 splatter film directed and written by Herschell Gordon Lewis hurled full-color gore onto the screen. Simultaneously grisly and titillating through the presence of 1963 Playboy Playmate Connie Mason, Two Thousand Maniacs! was retooled in 2005 as Robert Englund vehicle 2001 Maniacs.

She-Devils on Wheels

A year after Jack Nicholson’s 1967 Hells Angels on Wheels, Herschell Gordon Lewis put his own spin on the biker genre. In She-Devils on Wheels, a gang called the Man Eaters initiates one member by forcing her to drag her boyfriend through the streets after tying him to the back of her motorcycle. Lewis told a 1968 film festival audience that he made the movie, originally titled Man Eaters on Motorcycles, in response to charges that his pictures always portrayed female characters as victims of violence.

Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS

In the American Grindhouse documentary, director Don Edmonds says he regarded the script for his 1974 film Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS as "the worst piece of crap I’d ever read in my life."
Instead of downplaying the outrageous premise, Edmonds plunged full-bore into Nazi dominatrix territory. In true DIY tradition, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS was shot on the Hogan's Heroes prisoner-of-war sound stage after the TV series had been canceled.

Freaks

Easily the most shocking film of its time, eerie 1932 circus/murder drama Freaks still retains the power to disturb even the most jaded audiences. Director Tod Browning cast actual sideshow performers including dwarves, a bearded women and conjoined twins. Limbless performer Prince Randian, aka The Human Torso (pictured), even lights his own cigarette using only his tongue.

The Girl From Starship Venus

Also known as The Sexplorer, this 1978 romp from director Derek Ford borrows a page from Barbarella by following a young Venusian woman (played by Monika Ringwald) who visits Earth and just happens to land in swinging London. There, she embarks on a scientific expedition to research earthlings' mating habits.

Color Me Blood Red

Herschell Gordon Lewis came up with a wickedly ingenious premise for 1965 thriller Color Me Blood Red: An artist, criticized for having a poor eye for color, uses his own blood as paint. When he becomes weak from draining his own body, the painter begins using the blood of young women as his pigment.

The Last House on the Left

Horror of the most sadistic order permeates writer/director Wes Craven's 1972 thriller The Last House on the Left, which knocked audiences for a loop upon its release. Banned in the United Kingdom, the movie revived the tagline from 1965's Color Me Blood Red: "To avoid fainting, keep repeating — it's only a movie"
In 2009, Dennis Iliadis shot a remake of The Last House on the Left, which is pictured above.

Black Dynamite

Star Michael Jai White (pictured) hits it hard and heavy in this 2009 blaxpoitation-inspired action romp. Drawing on 1970s urban shoot-outs like Superfly, Black Caesar, The Mack and Foxy Brown, Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders follows the impossibly tough title character, an ex-CIA agent who goes on the rampage to clean up the streets after the Mafia kills his brother.
The movie also boasts fistfights, firearms and pimps aplenty. And, to make matters worse, the neighborhood has been infested with a batch of bad malt liquor.

Wired.com is giving away two DVD collections of high-intensity, low-brow cinema, courtesy of Shout Factory. Each prize consists of 15 DVDs from the Roger Corman's Cult Classics series, including cheap genre thrillers like Slumber Party Massacre and Big Fat Momma. Enter by giving a shout-out to your favorite exploitation film in the comments section below. Entries must be received by 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Sept. 9, 2010. Two randomly selected winners will be notified by e-mail.